Divorce rose dramatically throughout the Western world in the 1960s and 1970s. Some
observers welcomed this change arguing that it would free people from unhappy marriages,
thereby improving the sum of human happiness. In this optimistic view, divorcing parents
and children would all benefit from the end of parental strife and dissension, and the
mother would remarry a more compatible husband and together they would make a warm, secure
family with firm guidance and control over the children. Others argued that easy divorce
would eventually lead to the collapse of family life, to the detriment of all, especially
the children. In this pessimistic view, raising children is a challenging enough task for
two parents, but much harder for one parent, especially in the difficult teenage years.

The impact of divorce and remarriage on children's progress in school has, in
particular, become a major policy issue, and a major focus of research, because success or
failure in school has enduring consequences for the quality of life people get, the kind
of jobs they work at, who they marry, and how much they earn. Optimists argue that parents
getting a divorce would not harm their children's education, in part because the key
impact of the family arguably lies in early socialization and in exposure to high culture,
neither of which are much affected by divorce. But pessimists argue that the
disorganization, loss of parential control, and financial restrictions associated with
divorce will reduce the effectiveness of parents' socialization, so that children from
divorced or separated families will not get the full benefit of their parents' resources
and hence will have lower educational attainment than children from intact two-parent
families. Moreover, the difficulties that a sole parent -- or a step-parent -- faces in
raising children increase the risk that a child will do poorly in school. Evidence from
the USA and several other countries is not unequivocal, nor unproblematic, but generally
tends to support the pessimistic view, suggesting that divorce has a small but
statistically significant cost to the child's education and job prospects (Biblarz and
Raftery, 1993; Cherlin 1992: 75-90; Dronkers, 1994). Folkwisdom, too, emphasizes the
up-hill battle of raising children in broken families: only minorities "agree"
or "strongly agree" that "A single mother can bring up her children as well
as a married couple" in Australia (27%), Britain (32%), and America (38%) in the
International Social Survey Programme's "Family Values-Round 1" conducted in the
late 1980s (Evans 1992).

THE AUSTRALIAN CASE

In the past, divorce was rare and difficult in Austalia, as it was in most Western
nations. But no fault divorce was established by the Family Law Act taking effect in 1976,
which made divorce far easier to obtain. The result was a sudden but brief upsurge in
divorce, presumably reflecting decades of pent- up demand. Divorce then settled down again
but at a level roughly twice what it had been before the divorce reform. The lifetime risk
of divorce was about 10% of marriages up to the 1960s, rising dramatically to about 40%
for the marriages of the late 1970s (Carmichael and McDonald 1986). It then stabilized
with perhaps a gradual increasing, reaching 43% in 1993 (Webster 1995). Current divorce
levels are well within the usual range for Western nations, but still substantially below
American rates.

Enough time has passed since the Australian divorce reforms that we can now begin to
assess the impact of divorce on children's success in school using survey data. This paper
does so.

DATA AND MEASUREMENT

We analyze the effect of divorce using data from the International Social Science
Surveys of 1994 and 1989. These are both representative, nationwide samples of Australians
in all states and territories, with 4,513 respondents from 1989 and 1,378 from 1994. The
descriptive results of table 1 and the analysis of social differences between couples who
stay together and those who divorce are pased on a pooled sample from these two surveys.

To evaluate the educational consequences of divorce we analyze the educational
experiences of our 1989 respondents and their brothers and sisters. This gives information
on fully 12,451 children, 834 of whom had their childhoods disrupted by divorce and 891
disrupted by the death of a parent.

In both these surveys, we asked people an extensive set of questions about their family
situation when the were growing up (around age 14): about their mother's education, their
father's education and occupation, the number of books in the home, and whether their
parents had divorced or separated. We also asked about another kind of disruption more
common in past generations: whether one of their parents had died. Measurement details are
in an appendix.

HOW MANY CHILDREN ARE TOUCHED BY DIVORCE?

Our data show that few children born early in the century had to cope with divorce:
only 6 to 7 percent grew up in homes where there had been a divorce (table 1). This
remained true until the 1960s. But then for children born in the late 1960s -- who were
teenagers in the 1970s around the time of the divorce reform -- there was a dramatic
change: 10 to 12 percent grew up with divorced parents. This pattern continues to the
present, so that now about twice as many children must cope with divorce as in earlier
generations. By contrast, in the United States about 20% of children had to cope with
divorce, rising to a projected 40% for more recent cohorts (Bumpass, 1984).

Although children now are much more likely to face the difficulties of divorce,
children in earlier generations faced another, in some ways similar risk: many parents
died early from disease, accidents or war, thereby depriving children of a parent. Early
in the century 10 to 12% of children suffered the death of a parent. This risk has
declined steadily to 3% in modern times (except during the world wars).

These two trends pretty much off-set each other, with the risk of losing a parent
through death declining about as fast as the risk of losing one through divorce rises. As
a consequence, throughout this century around 15% of children have grown up in families
that lost a parent either through divorce or through death. There was a similar pattern in
the USA from about 1860 to the 1970s (Cherlin 1992: 25-26).

WHAT KIND OF FAMILIES ARE BROKEN BY DIVORCE OR DEATH?

Our data suggest that divorce is as common among well-educated families as among poorly
educated families, equally common among professional and managerial fathers at the top of
the occupational hierarchy as among unskilled workers at the bottom, and equally common
among intellectually oriented families living in homes full of books as it for families
without a single book in the house (see appendix). The only difference is history: divorce
was, as we have seen, rarer in the past than it is now.

Losing a parent through death is equally undiscriminating (see appendix). Death was
more or less indifferent to the family's education, occupational status, or intellectual
orientations. Again the only difference is history, with families in the past far more
vulnerable than modern ones.

EDUCATIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF PARENTS' DIVORCE

Background and Controls. To clearly establish the effect that a parent's death
or divorce has on the child's education, we first take into account what the family was
like to begin with: whether the parents were well or poorly educated, whether the father
has a good job or a bad job, whether the family fostered an intellectual atmosphere by
having lots of books around the house, how many other brothers and sisters were in the
family, and whether they grew up long ago when few people got much schooling, or more
recently when many people stay on in school or even go to university.

All of these are important:

(1) In families where both parents left school after year 8, children get on average
about one and a half years less education than children from families where both parents
have a university education.

(2) In addition to that, children from families at the bottom of the occupational
hierarchy (with fathers employed as farm laborers, unskilled factory workers, and the
like) on average get about one and one half years less education than do children from
families at the top of the occupational hierarchy (with fathers working as doctors,
lawyers, accountants and the like).

(3) Moreover, children growing up in families that failed to provide a rich intellectual
atmosphere with lots of books around the house also get less education, even aside from
their parents' education and work. In the extreme, children from families with only 10
books in the house get about one and a half years less education than children from
familes with 1000 books.

(4) Children growing up in big families get a little less education: those from 5 or 6
child families get about half a year less than is usual in one- child families.

(5) History also matters. Other things being equal, children born at the beginning of
the century average 3 years less education than children born in the 1970s.

Divorce. Our results suggest that divorce has an educational cost, but it is not
an educational disaster: children whose parents divorce get on average, half a year less
education than children from intact families. This loss is for children who are otherwise
comparable -- children whose parents have the same education, whose fathers have the same
occupation, who come from the same size families, and who grew up in the same historical
period.

For comparison, this half-year educational loss from divorce is about the same size as:

(1) the disadvantage of coming from a family where both parents completed only year 8 in
school compared to a family where parents completed year 10; or

(2) the disadvantage of coming from a family where the father is an unskilled laborer
compared to one where the father is in one of the higher sales occupations -- for example,
an insurance broker, travel agent, or shop manager.

(3) the disadvantage of coming from a family so un-intellectually inclined that they had
only 10 books around the house compared to a more intellectually inclined family with
around 50 books in the home; or

(4) the disadvantage of coming from a six child family compared to being an only child;
or

(5) the educational disadvantage of being born in the 1960s compared to the 1970s.

Our estimate of a half-year disadvantage stemming from divorce in Australia is at the
low end of the range found in the USA (Duncan, Featherman and Duncan, 1972; Featherman and
Hauser, 1978). The figures for both countries may be somewhat too large because they do
not take into account that some children's educational difficulties preceed their parents'
divorce, rather than being caused by it. This may account for half (for boys) or less (for
girls) of the apparent effect of divorce (Cherlin et al. 1991).

EDUCATIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE DEATH OF A PARENT

Losing a parent through death has the same effect as losing a parent through divorce:
the child gets about about half a year less education. This loss is for children whose
families are otherwise similar in education, father's occupation, family size, and living
in the same historical period. Similar results have been found in the USA (Crain and
Weisman 1972).

WHY DOES DIVORCE HARM CHILDREN'S EDUCATION?

That the loss from a parent dying is the same as the loss occasioned by a parent
divorcing suggests that the two may have a common cause: the loss of paternal
encouragement, emotional support, and guidance (Hogan and Kitagawa 1985). Research on the
USA tends to find that, net of economic factors, parents' divorce has a detrimental impact
on their children's behavior (e.g. Furstenberg et al. 1987), and that these behavioral
differences probably entirely account for the worse school marks of children of divorce
(Mulkey, Crain, and Harrington 1992).

The loss occasioned by divorce may also reflect the loss of financial support. This
possibility has been repeatedly suggested for the USA but other analyses of the Australian
experience suggest that finances have only a little to do with a child's chance of
completing year 12 in school, and nothing to do with university attendance (Evans and
Kelley, forthcoming). Moreover, Australia's relatively strict enforcement of child support
payments and relatively generous welfare system shelter children financially.

A sibling-model approach to these issues is in:

N. Borgers, J. Dronkers, L. Rollenberg, M.D.R. Evans and Jonathan Kelley
"Educational Resenblance Between Australian Siblings: Gender, Generations, Migration,
Family Forms and Mothers' Work". Paper to be presented to the 1995 Annual Meetings of
the American Sociological Association, Washington, D.C.

We recoded these into mean years of schooling using data on the actual
mean years of schooling for respondents in the corresponding categories. This gives scores
ranging from 0 (no education) to 15.7 (university completion), as shown above.
Respondent's educaiton was ascertained by a series of questions on years of primary and
secondary schooling and highest educational qualification (coded into the Australian
Bureau of Statistics' 3 digit edcuational code), and recoded into usual years of
schooling.

Fathers Occupational Status. Father's occupation was ascertained by a detailed series of
questions on occupation, duties, and industry; coded into the 4- digit Australian Standard
Classification of Occupations (ABS XXX); and thence recoded into Kelley's worldwide status
scores which provide a reliable measure similar to Duncan's status scores for the USA
(Kelley 1990). They range from 0 to 100:

Farm worker (status= 00)

Farm owner (status= 10)

Unskilled worker (status= 14)

Routine service (status= 18)

Semi-skilled worker (status= 24)

Routine sales (status= 32)

Higher service (status= 33)

Skilled workers (status= 37)

Routine clerical (status= 38)

Higher sales (status= 51)

Higher clerical (status= 60)

Technical (status= 70)

Admin, managerial (status= 75)

Higher professional (status= 100)

Father's occupationl status was not reported for only 7% of our
respondents overall. But for families broken by divorce the figure was 20% and fully 46%
for families broken by death. When it was not reported, we estimated it by OLS from
father's education if that was available (father's education was missing for only 15% of
families broken by divorce and 17% broken by death).

Books in the home. We measured the intellectual orientation of
the family by the number of books in the home whern respondent was 14. For the analysis we
use the natural log of the number of books.

Number of siblings was measured by direct questions on number of
brothers and number of sisters. Preliminary analysis showed that the effects of havng
brothers were the same as the effects of sisters, so we combined them for simplicity.

Year of birth was measued by a direct question.

Parents' divorce or death. Information on family type came from two questions:

Survey information: ISSS/A 1994.

The International Social Science Survey / Australia is a nation-wide
survey conducted by researchers at the Australian National University and the University
of Melbourne. Begun in 1984, it is Australia's leading academic survey and is devoted
entirely to academic research in the social sciences, is non-profit, and is not connected
with any business or political party. The survey's core sponsor is the Research School of
Social Sciences at ANU. The ISSS is based on large, representative national samples of all
states and territories, drawn from the electoral roll. The detailed and comprehensive
survey takes about two hours to complete. It is conducted by mail. The first mailing
includes a cover letter from the Australian National University and a postage-paid reply
envelope, followed by a further letter about two weeks later. Anyone who did not respond
within a month or so is then pursued by up to three more mailings over a six month period.
Comparison with the census shows the samples collected in this way to be representative of
the Australian population in age, sex, education, occupation, and other characteristics.
Dr. Jonathan Kelley is Director and principal investigator of the ISSS; Dr. Clive Bean
(Associate Director), Dr. M.D.R. Evans and Dr. Krzysztof Zagorski are co-principal
investigators.